El Salvador

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT EL SALVADOR - PAGE 5

By Julia Cass and Julia Cass,Knight-Ridder News Service | January 3, 1992

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The settlement ending the 12-year civil war in El Salvador is more than an agreement to stop fighting in a country where 75,000 have been killed. It is a pact to create profound changes in Salvadoran society that, on paper at least, will shift the conflict from an armed struggle to a political struggle."We are constructing the basement of a democracy," Juan Jose Martel, a member of the National Assembly, said of the peace process.A significant phase of that process ended late Tuesday night when United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar -- in the last hours before his 10-year tenure ended at midnight -- achieved accord between the two sides on details of the pact.

A man died yesterday while swimming at Sandy Point State Park on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, said a spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources.Spokesman Richard McIntire said Manuel Garcia, 39, a native of San Salvador, El Salvador, who lived in Hyattsville, was swimming with friends at the south beach about 1: 35 p.m. when one of them noticed he was floating on his stomach and was unresponsive.After the friends pulled Garcia to shore, park rangers attempted to revive him until Anne Arundel County Fire Department medics arrived and continued the effort, McIntire said.

A month has passed since she returned from El Salvador. But high school student Heather Howlett says she still cries when she sees photographs she took on her trip to the impoverished, war-torn Latin American nation.Howlett shared her photos with about 400 of her classmates at Notre Dame Preparatory School yesterday during an emotional slide presentation at the Catholic girls' school in Towson.The slide carousel clicked and images flashed on a large screen in the school auditorium. There were shots of shacks made of mud and sticks, bomb craters, people washing clothes in sewer water and dirty, half-naked children at play.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- On the first day of the cease-fire officially ending the Salvadoran civil war, the leftist guerrilla front served notice yesterday that while its differences with the political right have diminished, they have not disappeared."

Julio T. "Speedy" Gonzalez, who had been honorary consul to El Salvador and a successful Baltimore shipping executive whose motto was "My sales territory is the entire world," died Thursday from complications of diabetes at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. He was 88. "Everyone knew Speedy because he was active in the port and attended all port events," said Helen Delich Bentley, the former congresswoman and chairwoman of the Federal Maritime Commission. "It was a small company but very active.

WASHINGTON -- The Army has reversed itself and authorized a coveted combat badge for hundreds of soldiers who served under fire as advisers in El Salvador, recognition delayed in some cases for more than 15 years by domestic politics and Pentagon red tape.Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, the Army's chief of staff, has approved the Combat Infantryman Badge for soldiers -- mostly Green Berets -- who served as advisers from 1981 to 1992, when a peace accord between the Salvadoran government and Marxist rebels ended the conflict, the Army said in a statement yesterday.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- At the height of El Salvador's civil war, soldiers and police officers more than once gunned down protesters who gathered in the main downtown square.But last week, when the guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front held the final rally of their election campaign, police were present only to provide security for the candidates and an exuberant crowd waving red flags.El Salvador, one of the main battlegrounds of the East-West conflict during the 1980s, is about to take another big step toward a civil society.

By John M. McClintock and John M. McClintock,Mexico City Bureau of The Sun | September 27, 1991

MEXICO CITY -- All these external events mattered in getting to the agreement signed at the United Na tions Wednesday toward a cease-fire in El Salvador's 11-year-old civil war:President Bush has allowed Central America to drift off the list of American obsessions. The Sandinistas lost the 1990 election in neighboring Nicaragua. European communist regimes supportive of El Salvador's rebels collapsed. The Soviet Union -- had developed a "hands off Latin America" policy.But what mattered most was the change in El Salvador itself: The people were simply tired of a war that couldn't be won.The conflict has cost more than 72,000 lives in the nation of 5 million, created over a million refugees, most of them now in the United States, and set the gross national product back to the level of 1978.

I HAVE followed with great interest, and no small amount of anger, the recent trial of two former Salvadoran generals who were cleared of liability in the deaths of four American churchwomen in El Salvador nearly 20 years ago. On Dec. 2, 1980, Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel and lay volunteer Jean Donovan were abducted, raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers who suspected them of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas....

By Alisa Samuels and Alisa Samuels,Evening Sun Staff Richard Irwin contributed to this story | July 16, 1991

Three men and two women protesters have been arrested for refusing to leave Sen. Paul Sarbanes' downtown office.The protesters were there to attempt to pressure the Maryland senator into co-sponsoring a bill that would end U.S. military aid to El Salvador.The five were arrested shortly before 9 o'clock last night in the George H. Fallon Federal Building about two hours after they refused to leave the office. All were charged with trespassing.The men were held overnight at the Central District lockup and the women at the Women's Detention Center pending bail hearings today before a District Court commissioner, police said.